This study investigates the transition from being a listed company with a dispersed ownership structure to being a privately held company with a concentrated ownership structure. We consider a sample of private equity backed portfolio companies to evaluate the consequences of the corporate...

We are able to shed light on the black box of restructuring tools private equity investors use to improve the operational performance of their portfolio companies. By building on previous work considering performance evaluation of PE backed companies, we analyze whether private equity improves...

Kathryn Judge of Columbia University documents how financial intermediaries persistently impose high fees compared to the value rendered, attributes this to political influence, and suggests countervailing policy strategies, including stoking competition and enhancing disclosure to reduce...

This article aims to analyse the evolution over the recent years of LBO funds, in terms of valuation (asset prices) and the role that leverage and corporate governance played in its evolution.Leverage is one of the positive factors that is supposed to contribute to the success of private equity,...

We study the impact of institutional investors' “voice” on 201 going private tender offers by controlling shareholders ("freeze-out" offers) in Israel. Israeli regulatory intervention in freeze-out tender offers is relatively mild, thus institutional investors' activism becomes crucial. We...

This paper studies the role of activist investors in the M&A market. Our theory proposes that activist investors have an inherent advantage relative to bidders in pressuring entrenched incumbents to sell. As counterparties to the acquisition, bidders have a fundamental conflict of interests with...

We examine the role of non-venture private equity firms in the market for divested businesses, comparing targets bought by such firms to those bought by corporate acquirers. We argue that a combination of vigilant monitoring, high-powered incentives, patient capital and business independence...

Investor attention matters for corporate actions. Our new identification approach constructs firm-level shareholder "distraction" measures, by exploiting exogenous shocks to unrelated parts of institutional shareholders' portfolios. Firms with "distracted" shareholders are more likely to...

This paper investigates whether private equity (PE)-backed acquirers have a “parenting advantage” in the mergers & acquisitions (M&A) market. We employ a sample of 788 PE-backed firms and a carefully matched control group of 6,652 non-PE backed peers, for which we observe the entire...

Davis, Haltiwanger, Handley, Lerner, Lipsius, and Miranda (2019) produce an extension to the Davis et al. collection without addressing the critical research design issues raised in Ayash and Rastad (2017) and Ayash and Rastad (2018). First and foremost, the authors misrepresent their sample as...